ATI Radeon HD 5770 – DirectX 11 for the Masses

AMD may have released its first Evergreen GPUs mere weeks ago, but don’t think it’s slowing down for anybody. The company has followed-up with its first mid-range parts, belonging to the HD 5700 series. Performance is much more modest on these new cards, but no features have been scrapped. It’s all here… DirectX 11, Eyefinity and more.

F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin

Five out of the seven current games we use for testing are either sequels, or titles in an established series. F.E.A.R. 2 is one of the former, following up on the very popular First Encounter Assault Recon, released in fall of 2005. This horror-based first-person shooter brought to the table fantastic graphics, ultra-smooth gameplay, the ability to blow massive chunks out of anything, and also a very fun multi-player mode.

Three-and-a-half years later, we saw the introduction of the game’s sequel, Project Origin. As we had hoped, this title improved on the original where gameplay and graphics were concerned, and it was a no-brainer to want to begin including it in our testing. The game is gorgeous, and there’s much destruction to be had (who doesn’t love blowing expensive vases to pieces?). The game is also rather heavily scripted, which aides in producing repeatable results in our benchmarking.

Manual Run-through: The level used for our testing here is the first in the game, about ten minutes in. The scene begins with a travel up an elevator, with a robust city landscape behind us. Our run-through begins with a quick look at this cityscape, and then we proceed through the level until the point when we reach the far door as seen in the above screenshot.

The results seen here are quite similar to what we saw with Call of Duty. While the HD 5770 once again fails to keep up to the GTX 260 and HD 4870, it’s the latter card that comes out on top overall, although that lead shrinks with higher resolutions.

Graphics Card

Best Playable

Min FPS

Avg. FPS

NVIDIA GTX 295 1792MB (Reference)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA, 16xAF

45

95.767

NVIDIA GTX 285 1GB (EVGA)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA, 16xAF

39

62.014

NVIDIA GTX 275 896MB (Reference)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA, 16xAF

37

57.266

ATI HD 4890 1GB (Sapphire)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA, 16xAF

38

56.726

ATI HD 4870 1GB (Reference)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA, 16xAF

34

50.555

NVIDIA GTX 260 896MB (XFX)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA, 16xAF

29

48.110

ATI HD 5770 1GB (Reference)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA, 16xAF

31

47.411

NVIDIA GTX 250 1GB (EVGA)

2560×1600 – Max Detail, 4xAA, 16xAF

24

36.331

ATI HD 4770 512MB (Gigabyte)

2560×1600 – Normal Detail, 0xAA, 4xAF

30

43.215

Like Call of Juarez, F.E.A.R. 2 runs well on a variety of hardware, and any current mid-range card will handle the game fine at its absolute top graphics settings and resolution.